Governance of foundation trusts: dilemmas of diversity

Many of the key words of the modernisation agenda are applied to Foundation Trusts: public involvement, accountability, diversity and community ownership. They were created as a new system of NHS governance in which health services become, in the words of the Department of Health, "a co-operative owned by its members".

In this report, Patricia Day and Rudolf Klein show that Foundation Trusts operate in a multiplicity of ways in the different areas of the UK. This report focuses on the elections of the board of governors by self-selected members of the public and patients, as well as raising some more general issues about the new system of governance.